Month January 2007

Since Mac OS 8.1 (nine years ago) Apple OS has run on the HFS+ filesystem (which in turn is based on the 22 year old HFS), but maybesoon we will see a major upgrade with the introduction of the Zettabyte File System (ZFS). ZFS is very powerful for a number of reasons – and could make a huge difference to the user experience.

ZFS is a 128-bit file system, which means it can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 1018) times more data than the current 64-bit systems. The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will never be encountered in practice, as an example of how large these numbers are, if 1,000 files were created every second, it would take about 9,000 years to fill the file system. As project leader Bonwick said:

Pooled storage
ZFS can span a file system seamlessly across multiple disks and more can be added at anytime. This is good because it means a new hard disk can be added at any time, thereby adding redundancy and increasing performance by spreading i/o access across multiple disks. But is also improves the UX because users don’t have to worry about volumes, they just have storage.

Everything is copy-on-write which means live data is never overwritten

Everything is transactional – sets of changes either suceed or fail as a whole

Everything is checksummed – preventing silent data corruption

All this results in an incredibly robust filesystem, during Sun’s tests [pdf] it has been subjected to over a million forced, violent crashes without losing data integrity or leaking a single block.

The use of checksums on all data and metadata allows for ‘self healing‘ – ZFS can repair (using the data from the other mirror) silent data corruption by detecting the corruption before passing the data of to the process that asked for it.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a copy of the entire file system, snapshots are not the same as backups, the two most significant differences are efficiency and speed.

A snapshot only stores the individual disk blocks that have changed, this means that a snapshot uses far less disk space than a traditional backup. Snapshots also happen instantaneously regardless of the size of the file system size, indeed the time it takes to create a snapshot is often so small that there appears to be no delay.

So what might this all mean?

Beyond the obvious benefits related to performance and data integrity there may also be important UX considerations.

I’ve written previously about the issues of the two copy file system, now the ZFS’s use of snapshots would mean that there would be very little performance or storage overhead in automatically versioning data. This would mean Apple could remove the Save dialogue box from much of the UI; files could automatically be safely saved in the background with old versions retrieved via Time Machine as needed thereby removing the need for explicit saves and hiding more of the filesystem from the user.

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Google has announced that it has integrated YouTube into the Google Video search. The two sites remain separate but searching within Google Video will now return results from both YouTube and Google Video.

The Google Blog reassures people that the two services will continue “to play to their respective strengths” and that “Google will support YouTube by providing access to search and monetization platforms and, when/where YouTube launches internationally, to international resources”.

However, what I found most interesting is this:

“Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.“

It made me wonder if Google plan to eventually move Google Video to become solely a video search service (searching all video on the web), and divest all video hosting and user generated content to YouTube.

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If you are in Sydney, Australia, on the 26th January 2007 get yourself down to the Harbour. Google, as part of the Australia Day celebrations, are planning to take areal photographs of the city (from their Google branded plane) for Google Maps.

They have permission to fly low and take high resolution photographs so they will be able to pick out individual people – although you might want to wear a big hat.

Google have set up a Google Maps powered plane-tracker website to keep you informed of where to expect the the plane throughout the day.

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Never start a pitch by talking about yourself, your team, your product, or your total addressable market. Instead, start by naming the thing that’s getting in the way of your customer’s happiness. Do that by painting an emotionally resonant picture of how the world currently sucks for your customer, who/what is to blame, and why.

I design and manage digital products. I write and talk about linked data, the open web and product design. I work for Nature Publishing Group. I was responsible for: ensuring every band the BBC plays can have a page, every programme it broadcasts has a site and, for the BBC's nature site. And once upon a time I failed to get my PhD in freshwater macro invertebrate ecology.